Saturday, July 15, 2017

recode | Elon Musk doesn’t scare easily — he wants to send people
to Mars and believes that all cars will be driving themselves in the
next ten years. He’s excited about it!

But there is something that really scares Musk:
Artificial Intelligence, and the idea of software and machines taking
over their human creators.

He’s been warning people about AI for years,
and today called it the “biggest risk we face as a civilization” when
he spoke at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode
Island.

Musk then called on the government to proactively regulate artificial intelligence before things advance too far.

“Until people see robots going down the street killing
people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he
said. “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in
regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are
reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”

“Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch
of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a
regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” he continued.
“It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something
which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.
AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”